Wednesday, September 24, 2008

My Kitchen Floor Is Clean

For some reason I was feeling kind of ambitious yesterday so I scrubbed the kitchen floor. Maybe it wasn't ambition. I think I was just pissed at losing in fantasy football by one point, again. Two fumbles go my way and I'm 3-0 instead of 1-2. I'm going to start emailing the coaches to let them know what I need each player to do. "Ok, no pressure but I need Coles to score 4 touchdowns tomorrow. I know he's on the other team but would it kill you to just do me a little favour?"

Like I was saying, I scrubbed the floor yesterday. I think I scrubbed too hard and took all the colour off the linoleum. I'd have to check some photos from when we first moved in but I don't remember the floor ever being that strange white colour. I guess everyday traffic and a couple fires really pile up the dirt. I'm just happy the cleaning actually worked for me this time because it doesn't always. Turns out using the vacuum on the curtains is not good for the curtains, or the vacuum for that matter. Another helpful hint, which I can't stress enough, you can't use regular dish soap in a dishwasher. No matter how much you'd rather avoid going to the store to get the right kind of soap, it really just causes more problems than it solves. I found that out when I walked into a kitchen filled with soapy bubbles and a water covered floor. I thought that sort of thing only happened in silly movies but it turns out those movies are surprisingly accurate. It reminded me of the time a bubble bath got out of hand as a kid.

When I was like seven of eight we had a jacuzzi type tub with jets. It made bath time lots of fun especially when my parents would add some bubbles. So this one time I was playing in the tub along with my sister who's a couple years younger than me. The bubbles were going and it was great fun. The switch for the jets was on the wall by the door and my parents made sure to set it for a couple minutes. Just enough to make a descent pile of bubbles. Anyways, I got out of the tub and turned the dial to like twenty minutes. Now that I think about it, I'm wondering why were unsupervised at the time but that's a question for another time. As I'm sure you can imagine bubble bath plus twenty minutes of being stirred by jets equals a lot of bubbles. Actually, five or six minutes does the trick. That's about how long it took for my parents to realise the jets should have stopped already. They came in and had to wade through a giant wall of bubbles to try and find us. I don't remember them ever making that mistake again.

I can't talk about that tub though without mentioning when they installed it. It was a bit bigger than the tub that was originally in that bathroom. That meant my parents needed to take out the closet in the bathroom to accommodate their dream tub. They were also smart enough to know how to get that done for them. One day a friend of mine came over to play. My parents set us up with safety goggles, gloves, and some hammers. They told us to go ahead and knock that wall down. Do you have any idea how much fun that is for a seven year old? Hell, even at 31 I'd be downright giddy if I got to do something like that today. As I'm writing this, I'm looking around our house to figure out if we really need all these walls. I imagine when my wife reads this she's going to quickly hide anything in the house that could used for demolition purposes. Oh well, at least I've got the memories. The best part of it was when my friend's mom came to pick him up. We're both covered in dust with pieces of gyprock in our hair. Her face went white when he told her we'd knocked down a wall. Her panic turned to relief and I'm guessing a little bit of confusion when she found out we'd had permission to tear down the wall.

I find it kind of comforting to look back and realise my parents didn't always make the best decisions. Hopefully, I'll be able to remember some mistakes before I make the same ones myself. Not to say the wall thing was a mistake. I'd actually classify it as figgin' awesome. If the same situation does arise though I think I'll make sure to let the parents of the other kids involved aware of what's going on before they show up and think their child has just demolished a significant part of someone's house. Although freaking someone out like that does sound awfully tempting too. Guess we'll have to wait and see which path I choose on that one.